The First 200 Years
Book
Year
2022
Client
Allens
Services
Editing, design and typesetting, illustration, proofing, production and project management.
As the oldest law firm in Australia, in 2022 Allens celebrated 200 years since twenty-one-year-old George Allen was admitted as an attorney and solicitor of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and became the first person to complete their full legal training in Australia. Told in a series of stories and landmark cases the firm has been involved with, the Allens book was painstakingly designed and illustrated, and exquisitely presented.
The feedback has been fantastic. One of our partners sat up till 3am on Saturday reading the book and then went straight back to it as soon as he woke up again.
The Allens project had one of the more fun illustrations to work on, and one that really shows what Hyphen can do with storytelling. We needed an image to help the reader visualise a typing pool within the law firm in the 1960s. There were no archival photos to work from, but the author was able to conduct verbal interviews with staff who had worked in that typing pool. Using the transcripts of these interviews, and other images of typing pools in Australia at that point in time, I made a series of rough sketches and shared them with the client and former staff to collaboratively build up a drawing that felt accurate to those who worked there.